(2008) Just After Sunset

Just After Sunset is the fifth collection of short stories by Stephen King. It was released in hardcover by Scribner on November 11, 2008, and features a holographic dust jacket. On February 6, 2008, the author's official website revealed the title of the collection to be Just Past Sunset. About a month later, the title was subtly changed to Just After Sunset. Previous titles mentioned in the media by Stephen King himself were Pocket Rockets and Unnatural Acts of Human Intercourse.

Just After Sunset is the 57th book published by Stephen King, and was his eighth collection of...

In Just After Sunset, Stephen King's first short-story collection since 2002's Everything's Eventual, the author casts his creative net over everyday people who stumble into sticky situations that only his wonderfully warped mind can cook up.

A new short-story collection takes Stephen King back to the form that gave him his seat-of-the-pants start.

This was, for the most part, great, and at times brilliant. King seems to be one of the only authors today, especially in his genre, who consistently releases short story collections, though not all of the tales in Just After Sunset are horror. King is just as masterful at the short-form stories as he is at the monstrous novels, and that's more impressive than a lot of people realize. The short story is a craft all its own, and not an easy thing to pull off well.

The 13 previously uncollected short stories in this anthology tend to start strong and never reach the finish line.

When I interviewed Stephen King for this paper in 2006, he told me that the night before we met he'd had a dream that was so vivid he'd woken up in the middle of the night and wondered how anybody "could have so much power in their heads to have a dream like that". I begged him to tell me about the dream but he refused, saying he was certain it would show up in his fiction sooner or later. In the end notes to his latest collection, Just After Sunset, King expands on what he was going through at the time. Before coming to England to promote his novel Lisey's Story, he'd decided to go cold turkey and stop using the anti-depressant drug Doxepin, which he'd been taking to numb the chronic pain he'd been experiencing since his road accident in 1999. The side effects of quitting this drug were astonishing dreams.